The Biturbo: Both a Success and a Failure for Maserati

Paulius Gaurilčikas

The vast majority of people – even those who are not interested in cars – definitely know the Maserati name, and that alone is quite an achievement for this Italian car manufacturer. After all, the history of the brand had so many ups and downs that it could have easily found itself alongside the bankrupt De Tomaso or Iso.

Maserati is a much older brand than Porsche or Ferrari. The Maserati brothers had been assembling and upgrading various race cars in their garage as far back as 1914, and they already began producing race cars branded with their surname in 1926. Incidentally, it was also in 1926 that all Maseratis began to be accompanied by the famous trident that the brothers got the idea for from the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna. Their products did very well in motorsport and by 1934 Maserati had become the biggest single-seater race car maker in the world.

Sales fell so much that in 1987, Maserati didn't officially export a single Biturbo coupé to the US in order to at least help dealers clean out their warehouses in this way. Not even the newly released Biturbo four-door sedan or two-door convertible helped. Some 5,000 Biturbos had officially been imported into the United States by 1990, before the struggling company ultimately withdrew from the US market, only to return a good decade later.